


Talk to Me

by rarebirdalert



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Relationships Implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 15:36:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4441481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarebirdalert/pseuds/rarebirdalert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sighed, the words dragging out of him reluctantly. "Saki-senpai. I knew she didn't like me. Not like that. Maybe not as a friend, either. She put up with me, that's all."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Talk to Me

**Author's Note:**

> Adapted out of roleplay stuff and definitely connected to my other work A Schedule to Keep, but since it doesn't directly fit in with that one, I'm posting it as a standalone. Post-P4 and pre-P4Arena. Mostly just a whole lot of the loud and amazing friendship between Yosuke and Chie.

_What the hell is wrong with you, you dumbass?_

Yosuke looked at the screen dully. At first it seemed promising when his phone buzzed with a message, maybe something distract himself from the cloudy thoughts that were swarming him. But then he actually read the text, and who it was from. He snorted and tapped out his response. _the hell do u mean?_

He didn't have to wait long for the response. _You know damn well what I mean!_ He could practically hear her yelling in his ear.

Rolling his eyes, he typed in a reply. _well no, b/c u wont fuckin tell me._ And he waited.

His phone buzzed. INCOMING CALL: CHIE SATONAKA

"I figured," he muttered, looking around himself. He was in the back of the stock room, it was near the end of his shift, it was quiet, who even cared. He nudged the pallet next to him, then leaned against it when he was confident it wouldn't collapse on him, flipping his phone open. "So tell me."

"I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL COME THROUGH THIS PHONE AND STRANGLE YOU-!"

"Ow, jeez, Chie, knock it down a notch-" he yelped, holding the phone away from his ear. Did he put it on speaker? It seemed like it was on speaker.

"-WASTE MY TIME ON AN UNGRATEFUL ROTTEN LITTLE ASSHOLE! I've been trying to call you for HOURS!"

Oh. "I'm at work, Chie, you know that."

"Well OBVIOUSLY your phone works! What the HELL, Yosuke?"

"I dunno, I must have missed them. Whatever."

"No, not whatever! I swear I WILL come down there and if your phone isn't broken now it WILL BE when I get there! Talk to me, you dumbass!"

"Okay, okay, just tone it down or someone's gonna hear you yelling at me."

He heard her take a few deep breaths, and thankfully her volume level had decreased. A little. "WHEN are you going to learn that you make people worry when you pull this shit?"

He blinked. "What shit?"

"Oh, god, like, I dunno, NOT ANSWERING YOUR PHONE. Dammit, Yosuke!"

"Okay, yeah, we covered that, I didn't get the texts. Or calls. Whatever. What if I just didn't want you to bug me today." Vaguely he remembered he had seen new message and missed call notifications, but he'd dismissed them and promptly forgot about them.

"Okay, see, it's exactly this shit. I thought we were friends, dumbass."

"You know, you kinda confuse the issue when you keep calling me names."

She snorted. "What, does it hurt your feelings that I don't pull my punches?"

"And now you're threatening to punch me. See, you really are confused about what friends are." He knew it was a pathetic comeback. He didn't really care, he was going into this verbal sparring match on autopilot and just wanted to get her to leave him alone.

"Will you just shut up? God, you are the most annoying-" She cut herself off. "I did not call you to just go around in circles, okay? I called because I'm worried about you. You zoned out all day, you skipped lunch, you ran out of class, you didn't say anything-"

He closed his eyes. "I didn't want to."

"Well, now you better, because I am gonna get some answers, or I WILL march right down there and get them from you personally."

"Chie, just- just stop, okay?"

He heard a slight pause, and her voice was softer. "Just talk to me."

He sighed and looked up into the rafters. One of the fluorescent lights was out, and the one next to it was going out, flickering rapidly with a faint buzzing sound. He should tell someone about that, get it fixed. He pushed the thought away. "I knew she didn't like me."

There was silence for a moment, and he thought the call must have cut out, and he wouldn't have to talk about this, they could forget it ever happened. Then Chie said, much quieter, "Wait, what?"

He sighed, the words getting dragged out of him reluctantly. "Saki-senpai. I knew she didn't like me. Not like that. Maybe not as a friend, either. She put up with me, that's all."

"Oh." Chie was very quiet now. Confused, or worried, or--something. 

He didn't care, the words were happening now, and maybe if he just vomited all this up at her she would get fed up and leave him alone. "And I just...I acted like everything was the way I wanted it to be. Maybe if I nice enough, she'd change her mind, right? Heh." He read the print on the side of the boxes without the words registering. "You're right to call me a dumbass."

"So that's what's going on. I forgot that it was almost a year..."

"Okay, it's not just that," he said, his free hand curling into a fist. "I am sad, okay? I'm sad she's gone. It's not fair. She didn't deserve it. She deserved to get out of here like she wanted. I thought I'd gotten better, I thought I made peace with this, but I guess not, because it hurts to think about her, but that's not even the point, is it?"

"Yosuke..."

"Like, okay, great, I get to be sad about her, everyone gets all worried at me, hooray, I get attention, it's so sad and I'm so pathetic. But she's GONE."

"Yosuke-"

"I bet her brother still hates me too. Good, he should. And that shouldn't even matter, should it? She's gone. She didn't get to have her life." He felt that white heat threading its way through him, that same burning intensity he felt that night in the hospital room when they got the news that someone else was dead, someone else so close and loved, and then later when they entered the TV, and they were being taunted, and if he could be in that jail cell right now- He clenched his fist and punched the box. "Ow, fuck!"

"The hell was that?"

"Nothing. I punched something- some microwaves." He shook hand, flexing his fingers warily.

She snorted. "That was a stupid thing to do. Feel any better?" she asked, her voice tilted with sarcasm.

"Yeah, I feel great, thanks, I'm glad me being in pain is so rewarding to you."

"It's not, though," and her voice was soft and serious again. "And if you're ready to listen-"

"Fine, whatever," he sighed, staring back up at the ceiling while flexing his hand.

"It sucks, okay? I don't even know how much it sucks. But you did care about her, didn't you? Even though she didn't care about you."

"Thanks, Chie, you're great at this."

"Shut up, okay, I know I'm bad at it, but I'm trying, dammit, which is better than you're doing!"

He sighed. "Yeah, okay, you got a point. I knew she didn't like me and I still cared. Like. I worried when she was tired and stuff."

"Okay. So. You had your heart in the right place, you were just shitty about it. And you're not gonna have the chance to make it right by her, but it's not like that would have undone it, right?"

He thought about that, actually made himself consider what Chie was saying to him. Yeah, the fact that Saki was gone hadn't changed the fact that he had cared--still cared. She still affected him, even though it was one-sided. ...Kind of like that pathetic crush-or-whatever he'd had on her. So yeah, he had been pretty shitty about it, but maybe there was something good about it after all. He felt himself managing some sort of tired, lopsided grin. "You know, you might suck at this, but you do make a good point."

"Okay, so I am making sense?"

"Yeah. Like. I guess what matters is what I do from here, huh? Or something like that."

"Yeah, that's basically what I was gonna say. And- and you know you're not the same person you were last year."

"I kinda did get a Persona and help solve the murders and stuff." He wasn't in the TV, but if he reached just right, he could feel that something down in the core of himself, that subtle flow of strength and courage that came from the awakened facade of determination he had earned.

"And saved people." Her voice was a lot softer now. "You helped save Yukiko. And Kanji, and Rise, Teddie, Naoto- I mean, that's a pretty big deal."

He looked away, a nagging thought in his head about his exact motivations for doing so. "Yeah, okay, so I saved people, and solved things. How does that prove I'm better?"

"You said it yourself. You accepted your Shadow and got a Persona."

He closed his eyes now. He could still hear that voice, that distorted version of his own voice, taunting him, telling him all the worst things that he knew to be true about himself. "Yeah, well. I'm still glad you never saw my Shadow."

She snorted. "I'm glad you never told Yukiko about mine."

"Yeah." He paused and sighed, resting his head back against the boxes behind him. "I guess I wanted to be...special. Like, to someone." His memory flickered back to the overlook above town, leaning against the fence, wind in the trees, someone else standing beside him...

There was a hesitation in Chie, and a very peculiar kind of delicacy. "You are, you know. N-not, like, not like that, to me, okay, you're my friend even though you're an asshole-"

"Okay, I get it, I get it, you don't have to say this stuff to me-" he tried to talk over her.

"-definitely special to him," she finished, into a breath of silence between words.

He stopped talking. The silence returned, and now it was starting to linger in a really obvious way. He decided to say something, anything, because this was the most awkward possible thing to try to talk to Chie about. "Y-yeah, well, that...that's like, if he feels. Um. If he thinks- you know, it's just kind of, I don't-"

"Yeah, okay, I didn't mean to go there anyway," she said hurriedly. "I think you get it, though."

"Yeah, I get it, I do, okay, let's just not-"

"Just remember it, okay?" she said, her voice lilting into the more familiar, less nervous tones he knew her for. "And remember us, too. We're here. And you can talk to us when something's up."

"Yeah. I, uh. I guess I didn't want to bother anyone."

"Well, stop being such a dumbass!" she said, but this time her voice was far more fond than angry. "I'm telling you to talk to me, okay, that's like, permission to bother me!"

"Heh. You'll regret saying that."

"What, you think I can't handle you whining at me?"

"Yeah," he said, leaning back as a grin tugged his cheeks, "that's exactly what I think. I think you talk a big game, and then I come to you with a problem and you know what you'll do? You'll yell at me again, tell me I'm a dumbass, that's what your idea of helping me is."

"Well, you ARE a dumbass, and you NEED someone to kick your ass every once in a while, so don't even try to bait me into another yelling match, because I really will go down there and actually kick your ass, okay?" She was smirking, he could hear it.

He couldn't help the little sound that was almost a chuckle. "Yeah, okay. Sometimes I do need someone to help me get my head out of my ass."

"Nuh-uh, that's not what I said. I said kick your ass. And I really will."

His smile broadened. "I know you will, Chie. And you're right. About all of this." His eyes flickered along the rows of boxes and backstock. "I need to stop moping around. It's not helping anyone, and it only makes me into an asshole."

"A bigger asshole," she corrected.

"Fine, thanks."

"Told you."

"Yeah. I'm gonna go, okay? I've been on break too long, and I think there's some stuff I need to do tonight before I go to sleep."

"Yeah, okay, but hey, forecast says it'll be nice tomorrow, so let's have lunch on the roof, okay? Bring your own noodles, I'm not sharing mine again."

"That sounds good," he said, ignoring the jibe. A thought occurred to him. "...Invite Kanji too? And I'll ask Ted."

"Yeah, I'll do that." Her voice sounded a bit distant and wistful, but he could hardly blame her. It wouldn't be the whole team, just the members still regularly attending Yasogami High. But that would still mean something.

"Cool. And, uh, yeah, how about we meet you on the walk to school, that intersection on the hill?"

She snorted, but it sounded a lot more playful. "Great, now you're turning into clingy Yosuke."

"I am not! I just thought it'd be nice, but fine, if you're gonna be like that about it-"

She laughed. "Nah, bring it on. We haven't spent enough time together recently."

"We should, though. I mean, the holiday is coming up." And suddenly he remembered that he'd never actually told them... He grinned. "So we should definitely make some plans."

"Sounds good. I'll see you then, okay?"

"Yeah. Uh," and he paused. "Thanks, Chie."

She also paused, her voice coming a little bit strained. "Yeah, don't mention- wait, nevermind that. Just...ask, okay? I mean it when I say you can talk to me."

"I think I got it this time. And if I start to screw up, I have the threat of an ass-kicking looming over me to keep me in line."

"Damn right you do," and he could hear her feral grin. "'Night, Yosuke."

"Goodnight, Chie."

The call ended, and he leaned against the boxes for a few more moments. He did feel a lot...clearer. Cliche, maybe, but it was really like a burden was off his shoulders. Now he just had to remember to try to keep his head on straight, and remember that he didn't have to keep everything bottled up. Besides, once they were done yelling at each other, it really was good to talk to Chie.


End file.
